Peter Greenaway Quotes

I see an incredible abuse of close-ups in many films these days. Why is that?

Most of us do not consciously look at movies.

I'm a big fan of film for one reason: because it is visual.

What I am really curious about is the visuals of cinema... the form.

I've often been accused of, 'Oh the movies looked good but there's no story,' but I disagree with that in theory, and '9' is a perfect example for me because the feel, the texture, and the look of that world, and those characters, is the story. That's a major component of why you feel the way you do when you're watching it.

Pauline Kael had seen Nashville, and she loved Nashville. When I called her, she immediately responded to me because we had become friends, and I told her how great this film was, and she told me, "Well, I'll have to see it for myself." So I showed it to her, and she flipped.

I think the story should always determine the visual approach. There are situations where you want things to feel alive and like life, and there are situations that should have some magic and the separation with the grain.

The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn't.

Film has become such a central part of our culture now that I think sometimes too great a weight is placed upon it in terms of scrutiny and analysis. There's a lot of rather specious professorial stuff that swirls around films.

People say to me, "You make fantastic films" and I say, "No, I make documentaries.

But Mary Elizabeth felt different. She kept saying it was an "articulate" film. So "articulate." And I guess it was. The thing is, I didn't know what it said even if it said it very well.

The director [Elfar Adalsteins] came to me through my agent and I had a read of the script [of the "Sailcloth]. I thought immediately this is someone who is writing for the cinema. Not having to go through the tedious business of taking something from literature and making that awful leap that is so difficult to make anyway, from literature to cinema. It's refreshing to be able to deal with a subject like that, to be written where the driving force is the image on screen and you don't need any words. The more that we can do that [in film], the better.

Joe Wright is incredible and I'm a huge admirer of his work in general, but specifically his aesthetics and poeticism.

Stanley Kubrick was brilliant at getting under the audience's skin. He was very interested in the idea of, 'How can I tell this with just a camera?'

If you decide to direct a film, it's because you have something to say, something to show to the audience.

It doesn't matter whether you shoot on celluloid or on digital, you better make a good film.

I don't think the written word is important in movies anymore and the really great movies are done by great directors who in many cases write their own scripts. I think it's gotten to be more of a visual thing than an audible thing.

Everybody expects you to be qualified to talk about your films, but in a way, you're the least qualified person to talk about them. When you're finished, you don't watch them at all.

The cinema is truth 24 frames-per-second.

I am relatively familiar with getting a good old rumping from the critics. In some cases, the critics just didn't like the film - fair cop. Others, I think, didn't understand it.

A lifetime isn't long enough to learn how to make films.

The first really important book I read about filmmaking was The Film Technique by Pudovkin. This was some time before I had ever touched a movie camera and it opened my eyes to cutting and montage.

The only time I'm totally happy is when I'm watching films or making them.

There is something about the medium [in comics] that allows for a simulation of actual experience with the added benefit of actually reading. You're reading pictures, but you are also looking at them. It's a sort of combined activity that I can't really think of any other medium having, other than, say, a foreign film when you are reading and seeing. It allows for all sorts of associations that might not come up with just words or just pictures.

There have been innumerable films about film-making, but Otto e Mezzo was a film about the processes of thinking about making a film -- certainly the most enjoyable part of any cinema creation.